Freikorps in the context of "Nazi"

The Bavarian Soviet Republic, also known as Bavarian Council Republic or the Munich Soviet Republic (German: Räterepublik Baiern, Münchner Räterepublik), was a short-lived unrecognised socialist state in Bavaria during the German revolution of 1918–1919.

A group of communists and anarchists declared the Bavarian Soviet Republic on 6 April 1919, forcing the government of the existing Free State of Bavaria to flee to Bamberg in northern Bavaria. The members of the new government, led by playwright Ernst Toller, had no political or administrative experience, and after just six days in power they were ousted in a putsch organized by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The new head of state, the Russian-German Bolshevik Eugen Leviné, quickly instituted communist measures such as worker control of factories. Food shortages led to popular unrest, and on 3 May the Soviet Republic was put down by soldiers of the German Army supported by paramilitary Freikorps troops. Some 600 people died in the fighting. On 14 August 1919, the democratic Free State of Bavaria resumed control over all of Bavaria.

The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist ("Völkisch nationalist"), racist, and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeoisie, and anti-capitalism, disingenuously using socialist rhetoric to gain the support of the lower middle class; that was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression, when worsening living standards and widespread unemployment drove Germans into political extremism.

Central to Nazism were themes of racial segregation expressed in the idea of a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft). The party aimed to unite "racially desirable" Germans as national comrades while excluding those deemed to be either political dissidents, physically or intellectually inferior, or of a foreign race (Fremdvölkische). The Nazis sought to strengthen the Germanic people, the "Aryan master race", through racial purity and eugenics, broad social welfare programs, and a collective subordination of individual rights, which could be sacrificed for the good of the state on behalf of the people. To protect the supposed purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to disenfranchise, segregate, and eventually exterminate Jews, Romani, Slavs, the physically and mentally disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and political opponents. The persecution reached its climax when the party-controlled German state set in motion the Final Solution – an industrial system of genocide that carried out mass murders of around 6 million Jews and millions of other targeted victims in what has become known as the Holocaust.

German rearmament (Aufrüstung, German pronunciation: [ˈaʊ̯fˌʀʏstʊŋ]) was a policy and practice of rearmament carried out by Germany from 1918 to 1939 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which required German disarmament after World War I to prevent it from starting another war. It began on a small, secret, and informal basis shortly after the treaty was signed and was openly and massively expanded after the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.

Under the Weimar Republic, the early steps towards rearmament began with support for paramilitary groups including the Freikorps and Citizens' Defense, although the government banned most such groups by 1921. Secret cooperation between the German military and Soviet Russia began in 1921 and grew to include training in and manufacture of weapons banned by the Versailles Treaty. In 1926, military leadership revealed its previously secret programs to the civilian government and with its cooperation embarked on two large-scale rearmament programs designed to create a 21-division army by 1938. The poor economic conditions of the time, however, seriously limited the results prior to the Nazi assumption of power in 1933.

Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsiɪzəm, ˈnæt-/ NA(H)T-see-iz-əm), formally named National Socialism (NS; German: Nationalsozialismus, German: [natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪsmʊs] ), is the far-right totalitarian ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power, it was frequently called Hitler Fascism and Hitlerism. The term "neo-Nazism" is applied to far-right groups formed after World War II with similar ideology.

Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. Its beliefs include support for dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, anti-Romani sentiment, scientific racism, anti-Chinese sentiment, white supremacy, Nordicism, social Darwinism, homophobia, ableism, and eugenics. The Nazis' ultranationalism originated in pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement, which had been prominent within German ultranationalism since the late 19th century. Nazism was influenced by the Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which the party's "cult of violence" came. It subscribed to pseudo-scientific theories of a racial hierarchy, identifying ethnic Germans as part of what the Nazis regarded as a Nordic Aryan master race. Nazism sought to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous German society based on racial purity. The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, gain lands for expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum, and exclude those deemed either Community Aliens or "inferior" races (Untermenschen).

The Sudetendeutsches Freikorps (SFK) (Sudeten German Free Corps, also known as the Freikorps Sudetenland, Freikorps Henlein and Sudetendeutsche Legion) was a paramilitary organization founded on 17 September 1938 in Germany on direct order of Adolf Hitler. The organization was composed mainly of ethnic German citizens of Czechoslovakia with pro-Nazi sympathies who were sheltered, trained and equipped by the German army and who conducted cross-border terrorist operations into Czechoslovak territory from 1938 to 1939. They played an important role in Hitler's successful effort to occupy Czechoslovakia and annex the region known as Sudetenland into the Third Reich under Nazi Germany.

The Sudetendeutsches Freikorps was a successor to Freiwilliger Schutzdienst, also known as Ordnersgruppe, an organization established by the Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia unofficially in 1933 and officially on 17 May 1938, following the example of the Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary wing of the German Nazi Party. Officially registered as a promoter organization, the Freiwilliger Schutzdienst was dissolved on 16 September 1938 by the Czechoslovak authorities due to its implication in many criminal and terrorist activities. Many of its members as well as leadership, wanted for arrest by Czechoslovak authorities, had moved to Germany where they became the basis of the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps, conducting the Freikorps' first cross-border raids into Czechoslovakia only a few hours after its official establishment. Due to the smooth transition between the two organizations, similar membership, Nazi Germany's sponsorship and application of the same tactic of cross-border raids, some authors often do not particularly distinguish between the actions of Ordner (i.e. up to 16 September 1938) and Freikorps (i.e. from 17 September 1938).

The Free State of Bavaria (German: Freistaat Bayern) (1919–1933) was one of the constituent states of the federally organized Weimar Republic. The Free State was established in November 1918 and lasted until the Nazi regime absorbed all of Germany's federal states in April 1933. Following the end of World War II, the name "Free State of Bavaria" was taken up again in the Bavarian constitution of 1946. It remains Bavaria's official name today.

The Free State of Bavaria grew out of the German Empire's defeat in World War I and the German revolution of 1918–1919. King Ludwig III of Bavaria fled in the face of mass protests in November 1918, and workers' and soldiers' councils under the leadership of Kurt Eisner took over in Munich and Bavaria's other large cities. The Eisner government promised a non-revolutionary transition to socialism. Shortly after Eisner's party placed last among the major parties in the election for a state constitutional assembly, he was assassinated by a right-wing extremist. In March 1919, a new government was formed under the moderate socialist Johannes Hoffmann, but on 6 April the declaration of the Bavarian Soviet Republic forced it to flee Munich. After government and Freikorps troops violently suppressed the soviets, the Hoffmann government returned to Munich and enacted a republican constitution which officially made the Free State of Bavaria part of the Weimar Republic.